I’ve been wanting to have a daily writing habit for a long time. I read Julia Cameron’s famous book The Right to Write and innumerable academic-based writing texts like Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day
Luckily (?), I no longer have the luxury of figuring it out because DUM DUM DUMMM, my deadline looms. It isn’t so much that I lack the motivation, discipline, or even time anymore so much that my stupid brain gets in the way and fucks it all up. Delete, write a littttle, no delete delete delete, “I’m dum dum must research more,” and then curl up in a ball of insecurity.
As all the Self-Help books suggest, it is probably better to instill a HABIT instead of an emotionally-laden goal. And so, I have begun a writing challenge to build a daily writing habit.
Time I started writing: 12:30 pm, off and on until 3:30pm.
Location: home
Word count: 240
Review: I wanted to see how much I could write at home at what is normally the worst time of day for me. It went well – the danger zone is actually more like 3pm-5pm. I did not write more in the evening but ended up reading/researching again. 240 words is not much and it is because I’m still self censoring instead of blurting it all out (to be edited later).
The funny thing is, I could NOT do the typical Pomodoro Method of timed productivity because this image stuck in my head:
Just fyi, I will be keeping pretty close tabs on this goal for the next 30 days but it won’t all be naval gazing daily blog posts. There is an ON POINT blog post on this girl just waiting to be written:
(The young authoress of Mimi wo Sumaseba)
I Wish I Lived There 
I’ve made it to Week 4 in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and the “no reading for a week” thing always stops me cold. I know why she has it in the program. I can forget to eat, to sleep, to go home or to work on time, because I get so lost in a story nothing else matters. Reading is so much easier than writing! It delivers almost the same pleasures and it asks so much less of me…
Mimi wo Sumaseba is my favorite movie and I am still in awe of Shizuku’s putting down the storybooks and completing a story of her own. Yesterday I read a whole, whole lot but sometime after 11:30 at night I took myself in hand and said, you better write something before this day ends!
Time I started writing: 11:40-ish
Location: kitchen table
Word count: 160
Review: It looked like more written in my notebook than it does typed up for word count purposes and typing it up just now makes me want to throw away most of it. It also really reflects what’s going on in my life right now and I wonder how much is me trying to figure out how to stop being immobilized by fear and just act. However Joshua, my main character, also faces a very big choice and having to take a very heroic action all on his own so I may keep some of this and work it in. Children too can use some words of encouragement when faced with the fear of trying and the possibility of failure.
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“Reading is so much easier than writing! It delivers almost the same pleasures and it asks so much less of me”
This is the hardest thing for me too. One of the things my friend kept saying over and over again was to “stop reading and give yourself permission to stand alone.” It is hard to do because it is so much more pleasant to ride along on the words of someone else.
160 is better than 0. And don’t throw it away! Just write and edit later on. You can’t edit a story that isn’t written, right?
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